DSi Not Bound for US Until Well Into Next Year
EA May Have Gotten Early Look at DSi, New WiiWare Announcement Today
Tetris Party, Boingz Coming to WiiWare, World of Goo Dated
MadWorld Still Not Playable (In the US at Least)
The Conduit - Still Going Strong
Boingz: The Game Where You Play as a Condom
Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop Makes Me Sad
Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon - Not a Looker, But She's Got Heart
Cave Story - Everything That's Old Is New Again
Call of Duty: World At War - None Dare Call It Call of Duty 5
Tetris Party - Old Dogs Can Learn New Tricks

While all that was making my head explode going on, I also got the chance for some quality time with Mirror's Edge and Gears of War 2. Oh, and I also got my hands on NXE - it was pretty sweet.

I'm going to go feed on something else now - preferably pizza. Fahey got me stuck on pizza.

World at War doesn’t fail on all these fronts, but it is far from pretty. World War II (or whatever conflict we’re fighting – does anyone keep track anymore?) isn’t supposed to be pretty, but I’m pretty sure the world has more colors in it than green, brown and gray. I’m also pretty sure World at War on PS3 and 360 is going to look loads better because developer Treyarch subscribes to the notion that the Wii is a bastard stepchild console to be shunned.

I grabbed the Wii Zapper and went co-op with the demo handler to get a better look the level. If left to my own devices, I would have shot all my squad mates by mistake (it took me a while to figure out that the bad guys had shrubberies taped to their heads and that the targeting reticule turned red when it was pointed at them) and failed the mission.

As the second player, my gameplay experience was more like an on rails shooter. My yellow reticule hovered on screen right next to player one’s gray reticule. Player one did all the driving, decided where to go and who to shoot at. Because it wasn’t split screen, I got the impression that player two was like that guy from Total Recall. You know who I’m talking about.

Our team was out to destroy a bunker by flinging a grenade into the narrow slit – which meant we had to get close enough to be within flinging distance. This meant trekking up and down grassy hills and past lines of Nazis (at least I think they were Nazis), all wearing shrubbery camouflage. The level seemed pretty bare bones – and normally, I’d chalk this up to it being an early build. But… this game is supposed to come out in November and I know they didn’t build a new version of the engine for the Wii. So, basically, I was looking at Call of Duty 3 all over again – and unless something drastic changes during the polish phase, you will be too, poor Wii owner.

DS owners are getting a better deal all around. World at War on DS is being developed by n-Space, so it’s got more in common with Call of Duty 4 than its Wii cousin. Gameplay is made up of action parts where you walk through linear levels and shoot at Nazis, broken up by mini-game portions like the bomb diffusions and lock-breaking stuff we saw in Call of Duty 4 on DS. There are also mini-games with Morse code and other WW II-specific technologies.

This level was also about blowing up a bunker – but instead of having to get right up on it and fling a grenade into a building, we had to take a mortal gun from some Nazis and point it at the bunker. This went fairly well up until aiming the the mortar. I missed a few times before managing to land the shell where it needed to be and then – on my way to the next mortar location to blow up the next tower, we ran into some tougher Nazis I couldn’t kill fast enough.

At the end of my demo time, I felt like I’d had more fun on the DS than on the Wii. Part of it was I felt like there was more to do on the DS than on Wii; and part of it was a sneaking suspicion that n-Space’s game is a true evolved form of Call of Duty 4 whereas Treyarch’s game felt more like Call of Duty 3.5.

Both games are out November 11 – just in time for Veteran’s Day.

In its jump to WiiWare, Tetris has become Tetris Party. Multiplayer Tetris is not a new idea in and of itself, but the new game modes introduced in Party challenge everything we’ve ever learned by playing a Tetris game.

The most mind-blowing mode for me was Field Climber mode. The idea here is to use the falling pieces to build a structure up which a little stick figure can climb to get to the finish line at the top of the screen. This means – gasp! – there have to be blank spaces and you have to build little ziggurats so your guy can climb. It took me three tries before I was able to un-train my brain enough to not build a flat surface, and another two before I learned not to a) trap my guy in a place he couldn’t climb out of or b) squish him with a falling piece.

Shadow mode also forces you to unlearn your Tetris habits. You’re given an outline of a shape inside the the playing field that you have to fill in with pieces. You lose points for all the parts inside the shape you don’t fill in and for any pieces that fall outside the shape. As the levels get harder, the shape becomes more complex and you’ve got to get more creative with how you place your pieces to fill it all in.

Duel Spaces is the most hardcore of the “new school” of Tetris. The whole point is to take up as much room as you can by building around spaces on the field. You’re taking turns with other players to lay down your pieces, trying not to build a bridge for them to finish with one of their pieces, thus earning them the points. It’s like Blokus – you want to spread out early and cut the other guy off before he encroaches on the part of the field that you think of as “yours.”

The final mode I really enjoyed was Stage Racer – this was shown off at the Nintendo Media Summit to loud oohs and ahhs from the crowd. The field scrolls upward and either side of it is lined with grayed-out pieces that jut out, forming a maze. You play as a single piece falling through this level and your job is to constantly flip your piece and move it left to right, navigating the maze. At all levels of difficulty, the field moves as the same pace – but the arrangement of the maze gets more and more difficult and the pieces you’ve got to work with change to make it even more challenging.

The one lame thing about Tetris Party for me is the inclusion of the Wii Balance Board. You’re supposed to stand on it and move your body left, right, up and down to move and flip the piece. I guess the developer thought people wouldn’t be too into it, because they made this mode very easy, with big, kid-friendly pieces and a small playing playing field.

I’m actually surprised – I didn’t think I would like anyone messing with my time-honored Tetris. But most of these game modes were really fun for me, and I’ll be hard-pressed to find an excuse not to buy it when it comes out “sometime this fall.”

At first, I mistook it for something my teenage babysitter used to play to entertain me when I was a kid (his favorite was Bonk’s Adventure, mine was Metroid). But after listening to the demo handler discuss the details – especially the part about how hands-on the Japanese creator is with this WiiWare version – I got my story straight and started looking for reasons why gamers would want to regress to this kind of gameplay.

The thing I noticed right away was the story. It was surprisingly deep, well-written, and it moved damn quick. At the end of the first area, I came to a village of rabbit people arguing about what to do with an evil doctor and a chick that kept herself locked away in a room. There was also a short, creepy scene with a guy at a computer terminal running out of food and pleading for his sister to come save him. Heavy stuff.

I met the first boss in the rabbit village – a dude who can best be described as a suitcase. His co-minion (a chick), made off with one of the rabbit girls and he was left behind to deal with me. He asked if I wanted to fight, and I said no. And he left.

I did a double take. I just talked my way out of a boss fight. That’s not something I remember doing in Castlevania or Contra, or any other old game that Cave Story seems to be emulating.

Everything else feels familiar, though. The enemies, the sprites and the backgrounds all have a retro, pixilated feel to it (although the game has gotten a full graphical overhaul for the Wii). You start out without being able to shoot anything, and then you find a gun and level it up so you can shoot bigger and better kinds of blasts. When you go under water, you have an air gauge of 100 that refills when you come up for air. You also find keys and access cards and heart containers to expand your life. The save points are little floppy disks (remember those?), and the entire thing will support the Classic Controller – so you can pretend you’re playing a SNES while pretending you’re playing a twenty year old game.

Overall, I really liked Cave Story. You can tell that a lot of thought, time and energy went into making it and even if you’ve never playing any game in your life that would lend it some kind of nostalgia, it just feels fun to play. Can you really ask for more from a WiiWare title?

Cave Story should be out in time for the holidays, unless something horrible happens and the push it to early January.

Shadow Dragon is Marth’s chapter of the Fire Emblem story, and Nintendo is relying on his Smash Bros. fanbase to overcome the 18 year gap between Famicom and DS. The game has got the full music/graphics makeover going for it, along with a pretty spiffy localization job (somebody knows thy olde English). Alas, there’s only so far cosmetic surgery can go; visually, Shadow Dragon just doesn’t stack up to, say, Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings or Wild Arms XF. The talking heads cutscenes are pretty enough, but the Battle Chess-style fighting animations and map sprites look so pixilated you could grate cheese on them.

Forget the graphics, and focus on the gameplay. I slammed turn-based gameplay in my Fallout preview (and I’m not taking it back, so nya!), but I acknowledge it as a linchpin of SRPGs. It’s also one of the biggest stumbling points for SRPGs on portable systems.

The goal of any “portable” game is that you can stop playing and put it down whenever you need to. And I’m not talking about just closing the DS; this might shock you, but there are times when you really have to turn the damn thing completely off. For SRGPs, this is a problem, because the good ones have battles that can drag out for well over half an hour. Shadow Dragon addresses this problem by adding a mid-map, one-use save point. This acts as a quicksave function, since you can usually bypass the save have one character close enough to it at any time to use it during a turn (before the nice flight attendant snatches the DS from you).

You can also use it as a halfway point to save yourself if you get owned spectacularly in the the last three moves of the battle. This is really handy, considering that Shadow Dragon practices perma-death. That’s right. You can’t revive your units at the next town. No matter how important they may seem to the story, they can die; and if they die, they’re not coming back. Also, if they’re carrying a quest item in their inventory (say, the Dragon Sword or a dungeon key), they take it with them when they die and you can really fuck yourself in a boss fight without that Dragon Sword.

Despite that casual slice of brutality, Shadow Dragon has a gentler side. You can scale back the difficulty from “merciless” to “hard” (yeah, the lowest difficulty setting is “hard” – they didn’t screw around back in 1990) and go through the user-friendly tutorial that gently breaks perma-death to you about an hour in (even Marth was like, “He’s coming back, right? Right…?!”). There are also “supplemental” chapters to the story, should you lose one too many story characters in battle. I had this super nice princess chick riding a Pegasus lead me towards her father’s castle, only to bite it at the hands of a mage halfway there. Her daddy was awfully nice about it and two cutscenes later, I had a new Pegasus-riding chick from somewhere completely different that joined my party.

A major new addition to the game is the multiplayer mode. You can choose a unit you’ve trained and go head to head against a buddy on WiFi, or – if you’re one of those “nice” types – you can loan one of your units to a buddy for them to use. I didn’t get to see this in action, but I’m told that if you loan a unit, it’s not like you lose it – it just creates a copy of it on your friend’s game for them to use temporarily. A loaned unit will generate XP for the borrower only, I guess (lame), but if you’re too lazy to train your own units in the arena, unit loaning sounds like a good deal.

A lot of care and attention went into bringing Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon to the DS. It may not show in the graphics, but it’s dead obvious from the moment you start playing, whether you played the original or not. The Marth factor might only matter to Smash Bros. fans (and there’re four brand new prologue chapters for your back story fix); but SRPG fans owe it to themselves to give this game a go.

Second, Dead Rising came out two years ago on Xbox 360 – why do we need a Wii port now? We’ve got an amazing lineup of horror games coming out in the next four months; one of them being Resident Evil 5. Would it kill Capcom to develop the Wii version of that instead of crapping out a Johnny-come-lately Dead Rising?

Third, as Wii ports go, this one is shaping up to be the most bastard of bastard step-children. They’ve chopped more content out of the game than zombies have limbs and only gone so far as to add poodles in return. The motion controls are twitchy at best (but, thank God, totally optional), the graphics are jagged enough to cut your eyes on, and the only two playable missions were a “kill as many zombies as you can in two minutes” mode and the one with the chainsaw clown on the roof. There’s no more photojournalism of skanky zombies (despite Frank West still clutching his camera throughout the game), and all the missions are untimed – removing the desperate sense of urgency that ought to come standard with any zombie apocalypse.

“[We] wanted people to experience all the content,” says Capcom’s Chris Kramer – the man running the hands-on at Nintendo’s Fall Media Summit. Chris meant this in regards to the untimed missions. By taking the pressure off, you actually have time to go through and do all of the missions instead of having to choose which ones to fail and go back for a replay later.

I still find it funny that he said “all the content” with a straight face immediately after telling me there’d be no Pokémon Snap with zombies. “We added poodles,” he says, weakly.

Yes, yes they did. In addition to the max count of six zombies on screen at one time, there were two bloodstained poodles and a zombie parrot.

“We’ve been able to get about 30 zombies on screen in some of the screen shots,” Chris tells me. “And this build is the old one from [the Leipzig Games Convention]; we have a new one at TGS that has more [zombies] and better graphics.”

Gee, why not show off the new build here in the US? Where the skeptics like me live?

Chris shrugged and said he didn’t even know there was a new build until that very day. He then muttered something about “the joys of working for a Japanese company.”

If the build I was playing truly is a rough draft, then there might be hope yet. The motion controls might morph into something more intuitive. They might well get a lot of zombies on screen at one time – enough to make you freak out like you ought to when you get grabbed by two or three of them and dragged into a brain-starved horde.

I guess the folks at TGS will get a better idea of what to expect when Chop Till You Drop hits shelves in December. For my part, I’m completely underwhelmed and still sad – especially since I just now got the pun.

P.S. I get that the Wii can’t do what the 360 can in terms of graphics and in terms of memory storage. But what I don’t get is why developers treat the Wii like leper. With games like The Conduit and the Wii version of Guitar Hero: World Tour proving that the console can handle pretty decent-looking graphics and a lot of content, there really isn’t an excuse for something as fugly and awkward as Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop looks to be.

I’m not sure that’s what Ninja Bee had in mind when they came up with the 2D puzzle platformer for WiiWare. I can tell that the game has more in common with Lemmings or LocoRoco than it does with the contraceptive aisle in a pharmacy. But I can’t help but think as I grasp the reservoir tip antenna of the little green, blue, red, and yellow guys that there might be a penis in there that’s about to get snapped when I let go.

But enough about condoms. Let’s talk about why you want this game. And you do, because if the Wii has any answer to LittleBigPlanet, Boingz is it.

You play a single Boing at a time, waddling your way through a world to wake your buddies up and get them into color-coded exit games. The Boingz lack arms to grab things and can only jump short distances – so you get by mostly by snapping or flicking them across the level. To do this, you aim the Wiimote at a Boing’s head, press and hold A to grab and pull as you drag the Wiimote in different directions to find the right release angle. Once you’ve lined up your red trajectory arrow, you let go of A and your Boing goes flying – bouncing off of surfaces or sliding over hard angles like a jelly-filled condom rubber band. The goal is to get every Boing into a gate, but if you want to be a little more hardcore, you can try a timed mode where you race against the clock to solve the puzzle.

I started out with one blue guy that I had to flick across a body of water. I aimed him straight across, so he bounced off a sleeping yellow guy on the other side. Now that he was awake, I switched to control the yellow guy by pointing at him and pressing A. I tried to rocket the yellow guy up to a ledge above him where his exit gate was waiting, but the ledge was too high and I fell in the water. Boingz float, so I had no trouble jumping out of the water and getting back to where I left the blue guy below the ledge. Switching back to the blu guy, I grabbed him by his head and stretched his body across the water, pinning his antenna to the ground by pressing B. I then swapped back to the yellow guy and had him stand on the blue guy that now made a bouncy bridge across the water. From this angle, I was able to make the flick up onto the platform where the exit gate waited.

But wait! There was still another Boing in the level - a sleeping green guy way up on the top-most ledge. I targeted the exit gate where I’d sent my yellow guy and pressed A to call him back out. Through a series of flicks, I got him up to an even higher platform, where he woke up a green guy. I used the green guy to knock down a rock from a ledge and then stapled the yellow guy’s head to it before plunging off the side of a cliff to fall back down to where the blue guy was still hanging out. We rolled off of him and I switched controls so I could unpin the blue guy’s head, opening up the way to the water. Switching back to yellow, I used the weight of the rock stuck to his head to go deep underwater and collect a series of power-ups, which gave my Boingz the ability to jump higher. Now, without the need for blue to act as a bridge, I was able to get the yellow guy back up to his gate, get the blue guy across another body of water to his gate and then switch back up to green and send him over the cliff to where the green gate was.

That probably doesn’t sound as awesome as it is. But hey, I thought Braid sounded pretty dumb when someone tried to describe it.

The bottom line is Boingz is a physics based game that feels really good to play; the exact kind of game we want on the Wii. There’s a sense of accomplishment as you work your way through the increasingly difficult puzzles; and the bright, friendly colors plus cute sound effects are only the icing on the cake.

Look for it on WiiWare hopefully by the end of this month (maybe early next month – it’s in certification, and that can drag on for a while).

Less than two builds later, The Conduit looks worlds better. All of the graphics have been smoothed over thanks to new detail mapping, which also gets rid of those pesky blurring textures on walls and stuff. The lighting and colors have been tweaked so that a real sense of atmosphere comes through as you play. And we can finally see what the All Seeing Eye tool is supposed to do when you use it to search for hidden passages and enemies; something I didn’t get to try during my last whirlwind tour of the Wii FPS.

I started this demo somewhere underneath one of the government buildings in Washington (maybe the Pentagon). The long, dark corridors were moody and tense as orders were being given to me over an earpiece about where to go and who to shoot at. Gas-masked foes jumped out from behind crates and steel doorways, bringing on a rush of Time Crisis nostalgia as I gunned ‘em down.

I had to stop and fiddle with the motion controls a bit (mostly just to slow the turning speed). It was every bit as responsive and in-depth as I remembered, letting me set up the control scheme nearly any way I could think of. (I have a sneaking suspicion that The Conduit it would have worked out fine even without MotionPlus).

A “soft” targeting reticule was added to this build and there’s now an objective compass that tells you how far (and in which direction) your goal is. Facing a guy and holding down Z brings up a loose box around the enemy as well as a gauge that gives a rough estimate of his HP. Let go of Z and the reticule vanishes (that also seems to happen if the target gets too far out of range). So by “soft” reticule, High Voltage means you still have to work if you wanna shoot someone.

After finishing off or chasing away all of the gas mask guys, I came to what looked like a dead end and busted out the All Seeing Eye to look for a clue. I had to walk back along the corridor until I saw something flash on the wall and a yellow icon light up on screen. Using the All Seeing Eye, I triggered a secret lock that had me aligning semi-circles around an illuminati pyramid before a panel slid open to reveal a secret passage. At the end of the passage, a short cutscene showed one of the gas mask dudes getting disemboweled by an alien and then I was back to running through shadowy corridors, looking for more clues and more people to shoot.

Before, I compared this game to Turok. What I meant by that was, The Conduit evoked the marvelous feeling that Nintendo FPS games can hold their own against anything Sony comes up with (which I used to believe back when I was 13). I may be more jaded now (and a proud PS3 owner), but I honestly think when I look at The Conduit that I am looking at one of the best shooters anyone could ask for on any console.

Even better is the idea of multiplayer. No one’s gotten a look at this yet, but we have heard that WiiSpeak is being incorporated into this part of the game. Even if it weren’t, I’d still be stoked for multiplayer because if campaign mode is any indicator, The Conduit multiplayer stands to be the next GoldenEye. Which means two of my favorite N64 shooters will have been reenacted. Which means my wallet will be lighter. How about yours?

But nobody besides PR reps is allowed to touch the freaking game. Lucky for me, I know one of these PR reps – Mabel Chung gave me my second job as a tester at Sega way back in the day. She might not cut me any breaks with the no-hands-on rule, but she will give me a reasonable explanation (which you have to click the jump to hear):

“They haven’t really gotten the motion controls down yet,” Mabel says. Sega doesn’t want people to get attached before they finalize the controls; otherwise sassy journalists like me are liable to start kicking around worlds like “unintuitive” and “flailing.”

It didn’t look to me like Mabel was doing too much flailing as she took me on a guided tour of two different levels. The worst I saw was a part where she had to frantically drum with the Nunchuck and Wiimote to get in as many hits in as she could against one enemy for a point bonus. While doing that, she zipped through the whole spiel about the Death Watch plot and the logic behind killing people in as elaborate a way as you can to rack up points and progress to boss fights. “There’s a story, too,” she says. “But we don’t want to give too much away.”

Mabel’s main concern is people are going to get bored of MadWorld before playing the game. Sure, it looks incredibly dynamic (not going to make a “black and white and red all over” joke, sorry); but with Sega sitting so firmly on all other relevant details (and on hands-on privileges), many potential fans are just going to write it off as a senseless violence fest.

And to some extent, that’s the appeal. Mabel flung a guy into a cooling fan and then javelined somebody in the forehead with a sign post to trigger “Bloodbath” mode, which presented the Blood Press challenge. A giant spiked panel lowered from the ceiling and Mabel had only so many seconds to get as many people beneath it as she could before the panel smashed down, skewering all beneath in a wash of scarlet (Blood Press, get it?).

The point of all this, she tells me, is to rack up points so you can get through levels more quickly and see more of the world. There are five cities in the game and each city is made up of several areas (each one being its own level). The action-y ones are where you want to do the most exploring, so you can find all the neat ways to kill people (instead of boring ol’ beat downs); and that second level she got around to showing me was a racing challenge.

At least, I think it was supposed to be racing. Our character was tearing down a highway on a boss-looking motorcycle, dodging barrels and debris that seemed to come from nowhere.

“[This level] isn’t finished, yet. There’ll be enemies here that you also have to kill… but it’s different, because you have to run them over.” Mabel came to the end of the level where a tornado-making boss sprung a couple of cyclones at her and I had to step aside to let some other journo get a turn.

Mable waved goodbye with the Wiimote and I noticed her character seemed to spontaneously punch the nearest enemy.

Hm. Maybe there’s hope for those motion controls, yet. And maybe, just maybe, the guys at TGS will get their hands on this game...